I’m not a fanatical cyclist. I'm not a professional writer or photographer either. I’m just a guy who works in Washington, D.C., and uses my lunch break each day to go for a bike ride and discover some of the eclectic sites and events in and around the city. I take a few snapshots along the way with my cellphone, and then use this blog to post the photos and write about what I see, what I learn, and what I think about while I explore our nation's capital one ride at a time.

A while back I heard a story about an iron fence in Georgetown which was supposedly built using hundreds of rifles as the pickets. Wanting to see for myself, I rode to Georgetown during today’s lunchtime bike ride and personally examined the iron fence in question, which surrounds the property at 2803 and 2805 P Street (MAP).

The story goes that in 1859, Hall M1819 rifles were being stored at an armory in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, while preparations were being made to ship some of them out west to San Francisco. However, a famed abolitionist named John Brown and his militia, consisting of 21 men (16 white and 5 black), had been watching the arsenal and planned to seize the shipment of firearms and use them to supply an army of abolitionists. On October 16th of that year, the Brown militia marched into Harpers Ferry and took both hostages and control of the armory, and established what was briefly known as “John Brown’s Fort.” However, Brown’s insurrection did not end well, to say the least, for the abolitionists. A bloody battle ensued and U.S. Marines, led by Brevet Colonel Robert E. Lee and his aide J.E.B. Stuart, recaptured the Amory. Brown was subsequently hanged for treason.

For whatever reason, the raid prompted the military to cancel the shipment of Hall Rifles. Instead they were auctioned off instead. A Georgetown merchant and landowners named Rueben Daw purchased the guns and used the barrels to build a fence. Census records from that time indicate that Daw had also worked as a gunsmith, making it tempting to think that he might have enjoyed constructing the fencing around his property with gun barrels.

So do do I think the story is true? Well, on one hand there are other stories about the fence. But none of the stories began until a half a century after Daw passed away. So it’s really impossible to know for sure. On the other hand, while I was unable to definitively determine for myself the accuracy of the story, the Harper’s Ferry arsenal one is the most plausible. Additionally, when I examined he fence there were some signs that to me indicated that the fence was constructed using old rifles. For example, there are cracks in some of the pickets that not only reveal that each picket is hollow, but also that the walls of the pickets are far thicker than is structurally necessary for a perimeter fence. And the gun barrel fence is significantly more robust than other neighborhood fences, with each picket measuring about an inch in diameter. Additionally, some of the pickets have small protrusions which, to me, very much resemble gun sights. Finally, the pointy spiked tops are clearly separate inserts rather than wrought from the same piece of metal as the tubes.

So given my opinion that the fence is, in fact, made from recycled old rifles, and taking into account that the other stories contain inconsistencies or factual inaccuracies, I tend to believe the most plausible story about the Georgetown’s gun barrel fence. And at this time in our country’s history, in which our society is in the midst of a heated debate about the 2nd Amendment and gun control, I think we could use more “swords into ploughshares” stories like it.